Is it skyrocketing inflation in the cost of food and consumer goods and huge increases in the cost of housing?
Is it millions of illegal immigrants descending upon the United States through Joe Biden’s flim-flam border and the resulting increases in violent crime in immigrant magnet communities?
Is it a decaying level of clout on the world stage and runaway wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe that could ignite World War III?
Could any of these possibly be the defining issue of the 2024 election cycle?
Heavens no, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly told CNN interviewer Abby Phillip during a hen party interview of 7 female Democrat state governors recently. The defining issue of the upcoming election in the view of the Kansas chief executive is… wait for it… anything that curtails a woman disposing of her fetus and ending her pregnancy.
After all, when you woke up this morning wondering if the check you wrote for your house payment was going to clear the bank before your wife took the debit card to the grocery store (a pound of chicken tenders, $5.99) wasn’t the first thing that popped into your mind the ability and entitlement of American women to end their pregnancies?
When you drove to work and heard on the radio that the Russians were placing a nuclear weaponized satellite in orbit around the Earth capable of doing God knows what, it probably made no impression in your thoughts because you were so preoccupied with the in vitro embryo decision by the Alabama Supreme Court in the middle of February. When your safety is threatened or illegal immigrant crime is on your doorstep or you may not be able to pay your monthly bills, the most important thing in your mind should obviously be that a woman should be able to have an abortion whenever she wants.
When Kelly declared the priority that undoubtedly rules the emotionally and intellectually tone-deaf female Democrat governors club, investigators from Athens Georgia had just finished identifying the remains of 22 year-old nursing student Laken Riley, who police say was murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela on a popular jogging path in the city. Kelly’s statement also coincided with efforts by the city of Topeka to clear a homeless encampment from the banks of the Kansas River in our capital city – yet another indicator of the economic fallout and social permissiveness now defining our state and our country – as if she needed one more example that the problems besetting the rest of the country are no strangers to the Sunflower State.
What a brutal coincidence that Kelly’s comments circulate around the ending of life by
force, in the same moral sense that Laken Riley’s life was ended the day before.
The CNN broadcast was of course rife with the progressive buzzwords that always accompany the alarm that women’s “reproductive rights” are “under attack.” One wonders how ending a pregnancy – stopping a life in the mother’s womb – can be construed as a “reproductive right,” since the whole idea is to counter “reproduction.” But such is the terminology constant repetition by pro-abortionists and their acquiescent embrace of decades of complicit mainstream media engenders.
Far from her lament to CNN, Kelly should be ecstatic about the situation for abortion in this country since the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court. Remanding the issue to individual states along with the defeat of an anti-abortion amendment to the Kansas constitution in 2022 allowed Kelly and her henchman to turn Kansas into the Disney World of abortion seekers for the Midwest plain states – with a
huge influx of abortions now setting Kansas up as an abortion tourism mecca.
Indeed when it comes to abortion, these are high times on the Kansas plains – far from a major concern if you’re an abortion supporter.
The fact that these governors are so far out of touch with real world problems in their own states and the nation as a whole is symptomatic of the general malady within Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, and one Laura Kelly in particular exemplifies in the most embarrassing way
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.